Are caucuses unfair?

Do we hate old people now?

My mom couldn't caucus.

Awesome video.

You expect people to be considerate of your mother's health problems, but in your sig file, you make a tasteless joke at the expense of people with bipolar disorder.

Try having sympathy for all health problems, rather than expecting such sympathy only to be extended to members of your family, m'kay?

And plenty of older people show up.

Wanna borrow some chairs?

Maybe you should convince your state to do the same.

DAMN YOU!!!!!

:hi:

They are restricted to the most energetic and leisured, and lack the privacy of a voting booth.

blue-collar folks and people of color -- not exactly "leisured" types. And the way our caucuses work is, you cast a PRIVATE ballot for your presidential preference, and then if you want you can leave; or you can stick around if you want to participate in voting on resolutions or get yourself elected a delegate to the district convention. It's grassroots activism at its best. The uninformed and the apathetic don't show up, of course. But Minnesota has been using a caucus system for decades, and we have the highest voter turnout rate in the country for general elections and we consistently elect Democrats.

... you could show up, write your preference on a piece of paper, and leave, and your vote would be counted.

Or be one yourself. The actual vote was recorded on the sign in sheet when you came in, and if you changed your mind on the second ballot, it was recorded on the same sheet. So nobody had to stick around if their health conditions or job situation didn't depend on it.

When every last electro-fraud machine has been run over by a tank, THEN you can talk to me about abolishing the caucus system.

rules going into the race and only after they lost are they whining.

Typical hilary behavior..

to ask now as to ask if the last Superbowl should have been decided by regular-season wins and losses, total points, or Las Vegas odds.

Excellent (okay, not) cases can be made for all by the most die-hard of fans. But the rules is the rules and everyone knew going into the game what those rules were.

it is the system we have and have had for quite some time. After this election cycle we can overhaul the whole freaking thing if need be, but for now it's navel gazing and sour grapes...

dispenses with the secret ballot, and arbitrarily narrows choices to "viable candidates" in any given location is inherently unfair.

The fact that so many don't seem to think so reflects what I and many other have noticed about a certain candidates' supporters.

Partisanship over priciples and reason....

and nobody complained until this year, after they started losing. Note that Hillary said they were "easy" until she lost Iowa. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=racTAiemEQU I've been going to caucuses since the '70s and this is the first election where I've ever heard anyone, even the candidates who lost, claim they were unfair.

Everybody knew the rules. Everybody knew some states use caucuses and they knew exactly how they worked. So, Hillary, don't be calling the waaaaahmbulance now.

FOR YEARS, irrespective of who the candidates in any particular election were.

And for good reason.

Like I said -- I've been going to caucuses for 30 years and until now I've never heard a single whine. Not even from losers. But if states' parties wish to change their processes they can do so for next time. A bit late -- and unfair to the caucus-goers -- to move the goal posts for this election, though, since EVERYBODY KNEW THE RULES.

Crikey, we were annoyed with them back during the Hart campaign- even though we recognized reality and used them back then, too.

Bottom line: they have no business in the 21st Century for anything other than a vanity contest and excuse to have a gathering.

or claimed publicly that they were unfair or shouldn't count or didn't represent the opinion of a state's voters. If they are, in fact, unfair, maybe it's time for party activists to get their states' rules changed for next time. It does no good to whine about them now, though. Just looks like very, very sour grapes.

They're dysfunctional processes that aren't reflective of democracy or the choice of the electorate at large.

The way I see it, they're only marginally better (and sometimes, not even as accurate) as electronic voting machines- which is another profoundly bad idea that the party leadership has been remiss in doing anything about.

If there are special problems, we should address those.

I like caucuses, because voters must know WHY they are supporting a candidate and they have to learn how to negotiate with other members of the party. Sure, it requires more mature behaviors than simply voting in private, but why must everything be reduced to th elowest common denominator.

The demonstrably don't reflect the views of the voters in the state.

DU is 80% Obama Supporters and 20% Clinton supporters.

1. Narrow minded manichean us v. them "thinking" (from supposed "elitists" LOL) and

2. Inability to look at a process in the abstract and make a thoughtful decision based on objective criteria.

In many ways, GDP behavior isn't all that different all that different than Republican behavior!

and you aren't going to get honest opinions out of most people if that opinion negatively reflects their candidate. Essentially only the most offensive stuff will be policed by supporters and even that will be defended by 25% of them. This has nothing to do with being like republicans its the reality of politics.

If Gore had won the electoral college and Bush the popular vote we would all be talking about what geniuses the founding fathers are right now.

Bad ideas, bad policy and processes are just that.

Whether it's a gas tax holiday or shortsighted ethanol subsidies.

The deal with Republicans is that they'll follow their "leaders" without question- and support damn near anything that their team proposes- no matter how absurd it is. For them, it's all rah, rah go team and damn the conequences.

That mentality, more than anything else is responsible for the sorry shape this nation's in.

we go back to normal and we become bitchy policy wonks that criticise our leaders over bills and policy. During an election we close ranks. That is the difference.

After this Election is done, there can be a legit discussion on Caucuses, Winner Take All, Super Delegates, when states can have primaries etc.

Right now we are stuck with the rules that were set at the beginning of this and we have to go by those rules.

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We won the caucuses so now the Hillary people say they're unfair! Whatever - sour grapes. GooooooooooBAAAMA!

Open primaries are easily poached by opposing parties who have already picked their nominee. We have seen that in the primaries the past couple of months, when November McCain voters have voted instead in the Democratic primary to support Hillary, because they want to run against her.

Caucuses require a candidate to motivate people to do more than show up to vote. The candidate has to be able to get their people out in force.

We need a candidate who can motivate people, and we need a mechanism to bring new blood into the party structure. Caucuses do that.

The Texas system, where we have both a primary and caucuses, is best, but primaries without caucuses are prone to crossover corruption, as seen in several of Hillary's "wins."

Seems to me that they're even worse.

Here's an article I found from 2004 with, curiously, Gary Hart giving some obersvations:

On Jan. 19, 1976, the notion of the caucuses as a big event was such a novelty that the Iowa Democratic Party had raised $4,000 to help defray the caucus costs: selling tickets, at $10 a head and $1 a drink, so the public could watch the national reporters at work on election night. Now, the party uses the caucuses as a vital fund-raising tool, and the candidates pay tribute, as Senator John Edwards of North Carolina did by donating computer equipment worth thousands of dollars for use during this election cycle.

''That's getting very close to, I don't know what the right word would be -- not corruption, but something,'' said former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who first saw the Iowa caucuses as a way to build early support when he was George S. McGovern's campaign manager in 1972. Mr. Hart's own candidacy caught fire after his surprising second-place finish here behind Walter F. Mondale in 1984 helped propel him to victory in New Hampshire.

''In a perfect world, caucuses would be a very good way of figuring out which of the candidates has been persuasive,'' Mr. Hart added. ''But what started out as a person-to-person, humanized event has gotten to be very organized and professionalized. The deliberative aspect of it -- getting together in a rural Iowa farmhouse to debate the candidates' merits -- is the ideal, and I think we've strayed very far from that.''

''Caucus'' is an Algonquin Indian word meaning elder, and Iowa's system dates to its statehood, in 1846. But for most of their history, the caucuses remained comparatively obscure. Only after the debacle of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the subsequent revision of the party's rules to emphasize grass-roots power did Mr. Hart and others in the McGovern campaign seize on the caucuses as a way to make an early splash on a low budget.

It was all partly an accident: because the Iowa Democrats could not book a suitable meeting place for the state convention until May 20, 1972, and because new rules required 30 days between each party gathering (local, county, Congressional district and state convention) the latest possible date for the precinct-level caucuses was Jan. 24. For the first time, that put Iowa ahead of the New Hampshire primary, until then the initial test of candidates' strength.

More: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEEDD1439F93AA25752C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

but since obama did well in them, you won't get anything close to honest responses to this poll.

but everybody knew the rules, so there should be no complaining. Fix it in 2012